Joakim Lindblom focuses on building trusted communities

Atherton’s Joakim Lindblom has spent the last several years architecting a new kind of trusted community platform, recently launched as Trunity. Joakim, the startup’s President and Chief Technology Officer, is passionate about improving science education online, and began thinking with colleagues a few years ago about how an online platform could be used to enable a new kind of collaboration and knowledge sharing among students and teachers.

Working initially with the National Council for Science and the Environment and Professor Cutler J. Cleveland at Boston University, Joakim’s platform became the foundation for the development of the Encyclopedia of Earth, an online reference platform about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. Unlike more traditional wiki-like systems such as Wikipedia, Trunity’s knowledge management system is edited by a group of some 2,000 authors and 200 editors in over 60 countries who ensure the quality of the content that is published.

The new platform provides additional features such as “live cross publishing” which facilitates sharing of control across knowledge domains while providing immediate updating as new knowledge is added. Joachim has begun expanding his local engineering team to continue development of Trunity’s hosted platform for use in providing “living virtual textbooks” to higher education as well as K-12 education programs. In addition, both iPad and Android-based applications are being developed to help make the content that Trunity’s clients share even more conveniently available.

Trunity officially launched just a few weeks ago with the announcement of its Trunity Connect offering. Moving beyond just the education market, Trunity is also focusing on the use of its platform by businesses seeking to build online trusted communities with their customers.